


Of Best Friends and Waffles

by Brinny



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Titans (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst and Fluff and Smut, Batfamily Feels, Best Friends, Drunk Sex, F/M, Friends With Benefits, Mentions of Dawn Granger/Dick Grayson, Mild Sexual Content, No Plot/Plotless, Sappy Ending, Some Humor, Why Isn't Babs on this Show, probably not canon compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-13
Updated: 2018-12-13
Packaged: 2019-09-17 06:57:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16969881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brinny/pseuds/Brinny
Summary: "This thing he has with Barbara is sort of complicated. A few months ago, they started sleeping together. Again. But they’re not dating. Barbara has been very clear that she doesn’t want anything serious right now. She thinks that Dick is too young, and she has to focus on finishing her PhD. So, it’s just sex. Really, really amazing sex.(Which would be fine, except that Dick is totally in love with her.)"





	Of Best Friends and Waffles

**Author's Note:**

> This is that other one I was talking about. Yep. Here it is.
> 
> I had a hard time reconciling Dick from the comics with Dick on Titans (parenthetically, how is Dick a detective on that show with the timeline they've established? I have so many thoughts and feelings about that), so I hope his character works.  
>  
> 
> ...also, shitty title is shitty. Apologies.

On the night before Dick leaves Gotham, Barbara climbs up the fire escape of his fifth-floor apartment and somersaults through the open window.

“Babs, hey.”

“Hi,” she says, a bit breathless from the climb. “How’s it going?”

He lets himself laugh. Just a little. “You know I gave you a key, right?”

“More fun this way.” 

Moving one shoulder up in a shrug, she gives him a small smile and then drops herself into his lap, settling against his chest. She plays with the zipper on his hoodie, pulling it down and up and down again. Dick combs his fingers through the ends of her hair. 

“Don’t you have a dissertation to work on?” he asks. 

“Yes,” she says. She smirks before pressing a kiss to his cheek. “But I needed a distraction.” 

This thing he has with Barbara is sort of complicated. A few months ago, they started sleeping together. Again. But they’re not dating. Barbara has been very clear that she doesn’t want anything serious right now. She thinks that Dick is too young, and she has to focus on finishing her PhD. So, it’s just sex. Really, really amazing sex. 

(Which would be fine, except that Dick is totally in love with her.) 

“Babs, I don’t think I’d be a good distraction tonight.”

Barbara pulls back, frowning. “No?”

“No, uh, I just mean that, that I don’t think this is a good time,” he says. He shifts her off his lap and moves to sit on the arm of the sofa, instead. “You know?”

She tips her head, curiously. “Should I have called?”

She doesn’t usually call before she drops by. Sometimes, she’ll send him a quick text first ( _dude, found the best thai takeout, hungry? _and_ miss your mouth, boy wonder_ and _heading over, get netflix ready_ ) and sometimes she isolates him on the comms and asks, _hey, your place, short pants off?_ But she doesn’t usually call. 

“No, no. It’s, it’s fine.” He rubs at the back of his head with his hand, keeps his eyes down. “I just have, I have a lot going on right now.” 

“Oh,” she says. She reaches over, affectionately rubbing her hand over his knee. “Okay. Want to talk about it?”

“Not really.”

He quickly glances towards the closed, bedroom door (where there’s a half-packed suitcase and a messy stack of cardboard boxes) and Barbara follows his gaze. 

“What? You got a girl in there or something?”

“No. No girl.”

“Boy?” 

“No. Look, Babs, I would love nothing more than to, well, I would love to, with you—”

“It’s just not a good time?” she guesses. 

“Right.”

“Sure, okay,” she says. “Then how about a drink?”

“Barbara,” he says, lowly, and it sounds like it’s a warning. 

“C’mon.” She leans up and kisses him, hands in his hair and tongue in his mouth. “Please?”

“Okay. One drink,” he tells her. Lifting his forefinger, he waves it in front of her face and repeats, “One.”

Barbara smiles and pulls his finger to her lips, gently kissing the tip, and it takes every ounce of his training for Dick to pretend that he doesn’t find her adorably charming. 

“One drink,” he says again. 

 

They end up having more than one drink. 

 

“So, what’s going on with you?”

“I, I don’t know,” he says. He tips his glass back to drain the last few drops of alcohol sitting at the bottom. “Don’t you ever get tired of it?”

“Tired of what?”

“Of being Batman’s sidekick.”

“Okay, well first of all, I’m not a sidekick,” she says, smiling into her drink. “And what we’re doing? It’s good, Dick. We’re helping people.”

“Are we?” he asks. He puts his glass down on the floor, but doesn’t move to get a sixth or seventh or whatever number he’s on. “I guess sometimes it just doesn’t feel like it. Feels more like we’re helping ourselves.”

“Is that why you’ve been acting so weird lately?”

And Dick wants to tell her. 

He wants to tell her that he’s been acting so weird lately because he can’t stop fighting with Bruce. He wants to tell her that he doesn’t want to be Robin anymore. He wants to tell her that he’s leaving Gotham tomorrow morning.

(And another part of him wants to tell her that he loves her. That he’s in love with her, really. And that he’s never been any good at family, but maybe, with her, he could try.) 

But Dick doesn’t tell Barbara anything. 

Instead, he gently takes her half-full glass of whiskey from her hand and sets it down on the coffee table. Leaning in, he stops to tuck her hair behind her ear, then holds his hand against her cheek and kisses her. 

“Mm,” she says. “Change your mind about that distraction thing?” 

“Yeah, something like that.”

Barbara moves into his lap, pressing her lips to his temple. Slowly, Dick undoes the buttons on her shirt, sliding them open one by one, using his fingers and mouth to stop and explore each time he reveals a new piece of skin. Barbara holds his head in her hands, tugging his hair between her fingers. 

“See? You are good at this.”

He laughs. “Master of distraction.”

“Well, let’s not get carried away,” she says. 

Dick smirks and Babs cups his chin, bringing him closer to kiss her. 

And they stay like that for awhile, lazily kissing and touching and moving against each other (a little like they used to when they were teenagers), until they’re both kind of breathless and aching for a release.

Dick slides his hand under Barbara’s skirt, fingers lightly stroking along her thigh. When she nods, he dips into her panties, playing with the wetness he finds there. Gently, he rubs at her, his fingers making firm and tight circles over her clit, until she comes. And he kisses her through it, pressing his lips to her mouth and then her cheeks and chin and neck. 

“Bedroom?” she asks. 

“No,” he says, shaking his head. 

Even if his room wasn’t filled with suitcases and boxes, he really wants to be in her, like now, right this second. Freeing himself from his pants, Dick pulls her underwear to the side and quickly pushes into her. 

“Uh, Dick,” she says. “Forgetting something?”

He holds her hips in his hands, slowly pumping in and out of her. Gazing up at her, he says, “Uh-huh, yeah.” He kisses the underside of her breast. “You’re so beautiful.”

“Guess again.” 

And all he can think to say is, “Huh?” because, oh my god, she feels so good, tight and wet, around his cock. Which is when he gets it. 

“Oh, fuck. Right. Shit. Sorry, I’m sorry.”

He pulls out of her and fishes his wallet out of his pocket, producing a condom. As he rolls it on, Babs smiles and makes a show out of slipping off her skirt and panties and spreading her legs for him to re-enter her. 

Shit, he is really going to miss her. 

 

He doesn’t see her again for over a year. 

 

Dick hears from Roy that Bruce is out of town and, after confirming with Alfred (including that the new, baby Bird went with the Bat), he stops by the manor for a visit. 

He’s sitting on the kitchen counter (over Alfred’s half-hearted protests of, _Master Richard, please show some sort of decorum_ ), shoveling down a bowlful of cornflakes while Alfred cooks him “something more suitable” for breakfast. Something more suitable turns out to be Belgian waffles, so he watches Alfred carefully fold whipped egg whites into a large bowl of batter. 

“I’m telling you Al,” he says, through a mouthful of soggy flakes and milk. On Alfred’s raised brow, he pauses to swallow. “He acts like I’m fucking dead.”

“Language, Master Richard.”

“Right. Sorry. It’s just—”

Dick stops at the sound of the side door creaking open. And he almost drops his bowl of cereal when he sees who walks through the door. She has her head down, fingers flicking over the screen of her phone, but he can tell that it’s her just from the hair. 

“Oh, shit,” he says, lowly (although, apparently, not low enough that Alfred doesn’t give him a disapproving look), as he hops off the counter. 

“Hi Alfred,” she says. She gives a final swipe of her thumb, then tucks her phone into her purse. Looking up, she sees Dick, and her mouth instantly drops into a scowl. “Oh my god. Asshole. What are you doing here?”

And Dick thinks it’s kind of unfair that she doesn’t get any verbal or visual reprimands from Alfred about her language. He also thinks that he probably shouldn’t bring that up right now. 

Dick clears his throat. “Hi Babs.”

“Excuse me? ‘Hi Babs?’ Do better than that, Grayson.”

“Hello Barbara?” he tries. 

“Does Bruce know you’re here?” she asks. 

He snorts. “What do you think?”

“I think he’s in Coast City on Bat business and that you’re a coward.”

“Well, then there’s your answer.”

Barbara grabs for his hand and says, “We need to talk.”

Dick shifts uncomfortably. “We are talking.”

“Alone.”

“But, waffles,” Dick says. 

 

Barbara pulls him up the stairs and into his old bedroom. Dick hasn’t been in this room in years. 

When they were kids, they used to sit on the window bench and Barbara would read out long chapters of Sherlock Holmes, doing all the voices. As teenagers, they fooled around in his bed a few times after patrol, but it was too difficult to hide from Bruce and Alfred, so Dick used to sneak into Barbara’s dorm instead. 

(And then, for awhile, in between, there was Dawn.) 

But it was all so long ago, and Dick wonders how she even remembered which wing to go to, which hall to turn down, which door to open. He doesn’t get a chance to ask her though, because the second she closes the double doors behind them, she starts in on him. 

“How could you leave like that and not even tell me?”

“I really don’t want to do this right now, Babs.”

“Too bad,” she says. “We’re doing it.”

“Look, I didn’t mean to hurt you. But I couldn’t stay here. I had to get out, I had to leave Gotham.”

“And your mouth was incapable of saying those things to me before you left?”

“I don’t know what you want from me, Barbara.”

“I want you to know how absolutely humiliating it was to literally go crying to Bruce, because you were just gone,” she says. Her eyes fill with tears as she remembers, but she quickly blinks them back. “And I didn’t know that you’d left, so I thought that, I thought something awful had happened to you. And then it turns out that you were fine.”

“I would say that ‘fine’ is a relative term,” he tells her. And, even though he tries to stop it, an angry edge creeps into his voice. “All things considered.”

“Dick, I thought you were dead.”

He scoffs. “Yeah, seems to be a trend around here.”

“What happened between you two?”

“That we are definitely not doing right now.”

She shrugs. “Okay. I just thought you might want to talk about it.”

“Well, I don’t.”

Dick moves to sit on the bed and Barbara follows, reaching over to grab Dick’s hand. The fight has gone out of her a little bit, the initial shock and anger of seeing him again has dulled. 

“I used to be your best friend, you know,” she says. She grips his hand a bit tighter. “You can tell me anything.”

He gives a sad smile. “You’ll always be my best friend, Babs.”

“Good,” she says. She leans her shoulder into his. “Now, tell me again why you skipped town and didn’t think it was worth a mention to your always best friend.”

Dick huffs out a sigh. “Barbara.”

“Humor a girl.”

“Because if I told you that I was going to leave Gotham, you would have tried to convince me to stay. And I couldn’t do that.”

“What? Stay?” she asks. 

“No,” Dick says through a laugh. “Well, yes. I mean, yeah, I couldn’t stay. But I also couldn’t say no to you. Not then. You and me? That was everything that I had ever wanted as a kid. So, if I told you, and you’d asked, I would have stayed. For you.” 

“Oh, my god.” She lets go of his hand. “You suck.” 

“I what? Why?”

“You suck,” she says again, shaking her head. “You are impossible to stay mad at, you know that? I should be kicking your ass, and we both know that I could, and then, then you go and say all that stupid shit and you look so pretty when you’re saying it. And, and I just can’t.”

He smirks, happily. “Oh yeah? That really did it for you, huh?”

“Nope. No, you ruined it.”

Dick laughs and then pulls her closer to catch her lips in a kiss. Babs lets her mouth open under his.

And then, “Wait, did you say that Alfred was making waffles?”

“For real?”

She kisses him again. “Oh, I missed you, former Boy Wonder.”

“Yeah, I missed you too, Babs.”


End file.
